Zeiss Distagon 15mm f/2.8, Nikon ZF.2 version.enlarge. (95mm filters, 25.8 oz./730g), 10"/0.25m close-focus, $2,950).This free website's biggest source of support is when you use those or any of these links when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thanks! Ken.

This Zeiss lens is bigger, heavier and costs more — and is optically far superior.

If you're a Canon full-frame shooter who wants more sharpness than you're getting from Canon's ultrawide lenses (and no color fringes), this is a significant step up — if you don't mind manual focus.

I had no Nikon version to pit against Nikon; I suspect it's about as sharp as Nikon's 16-35mm VR, but better made, has much less distortion and is twice as sensitive to light, but lacking AF and VR. This Zeiss should be far sharper than Nikon's 15mm f/3.5 and 15mm f/5.6 manual-focus lenses, but with a little more distortion (those old Nikon 15mm lenses have no distortion).

This CPU and AI-s lens works perfectly with every Nikon SLR made from 1977 through today's latest DSLRs, from the D4X, D800 and D800E down to Nikon's cheapest D3100, so long as you don't mind focusing manually.

It has no coupling prong to meter with Nikon F-mount cameras made before 1977; you'll need to add a prong to meter with the Nikon F and early F2s, but even if you don't, it shoots perfectly.

While Nikon and Canon left the professional world years ago and only supply wimpy plastic caps with their most expensive lenses, this Zeiss is the only current SLR lens to come with a real metal front cap.

Nikon's first two 15mm f/3.5 and 15mm f/5.6 manual-focus lenses came with real metal caps, while today's 14mm f/2.8 and 14~24mm f/2.8 only come with either a sock or a crappy plastic thing that doesn't even block dust.

None of Canon's zooms or 14mm are this sharp; look at the original file and the darn Zeiss lens is on the verge of exciting aliases on the grate perforations all the way out to the edges!

Nikon and Canon's zooms and Nikon's 14mm are loaded with distortion, so the horizontal lines would bulge-out from the center, not be straight as they are here.

Even if a Nikon or Canon lens might be sharp, like the Nikon 16-35mm, it's loaded with distortion. Once you correct the distortion in Photoshop or otherwise, you lose resolution from resampling.

If you chose a Nikon or Canon ultrawide devoid of distortion, like the Nikon fixed 15mm or Canon fixed 14mm, they aren't sharp; and all the Canon lenses are loaded with lateral color. This Zeiss is astounding in that it has no lateral color on the Canon 5D Mark II; the edges look as they're supposed to without color fringes.

Even if Nikon or Canon had a lens which was both sharp and undistorted at f/11 as above, they certainly have nothing that can do this at f/2.8:

Yes, the Zeiss 15/2,8 is so sharp that it's exciting aliases in the center, and doing a very good job of trying even on the sides. Even when reduced onscreen here, you can see that all the perforations are exciting moiré on the right side as Photoshop CS5 tried to resize it to 600 pixels here. Bravo! original f/2.8 file.

Unlike today's plastic zooms, this is all-metal. If you're used to plopping your Nikon and Canon plastic beauties down on your glass table or desktop, back off — you need to be careful with these heavy metal Zeiss lenses.

Thank goodness each version focuses in the same direction as do Nikon's and Canon's own lenses.

Focus is super-smooth, fast and optimally damped. Just a fingertip can slide it around.

The red footage engravings are invisible. They stand out these well-lit photos because I've bumped-up the color saturation which lightness the red. In anything but direct sunlight, they are actually dark burgundy on black.

The EOS mount has no external red index dot, as do Canon's own lenses. You have to look for the red dot on the back of the mount, which is a pain!

There is no "15" engraved on the side. You have to just know that this big thing is your 15mm.

The filter ring never rotates, and 95mm filters easily screw on and off inside the fixed metal upper and lower guards.

There's a catch: my big professional 95mm filters from Hoya and Schneider are mounted in 9mm-thick rings, excluding their rear threads. With these standard filters, there is visible vignetting in the corners, making these filters far less useful unless you're cropping the sides.

In other words, this is one of the few lenses that demands special thin filters to work well. This is sad, considering that my Zeiss 35mm f/3.5 ultrawide for my Contax 645 works perfectly with the same 95mm filters. Whoops!

Don't bother with polarizers on ultrawide lenses. The polarization of the natural world varies so much over this lens' huge angle-of-view that polarizers lead to weird dark bands over your picture with ultrawide lenses. See an example of wide-angle polarization.

For a 15mm lens, flare and ghosts are very, very low. For comparison, the Nikon 15mm f/3.5 is awful, while this Zeiss has no flare or ghosts unless you do something deliberately stupid.

If you are silly enough to point it at the sun, there is one dim dot opposite the sun, which bizarrely looks like a flock of green blobs here, I presume from some bizarre reflection off the CCD of the 5D Mark II used for this shot.

There is also one blob near the sun that's so dim as to be insignificant.

It moves end-to-end with a fingertip, although not it's not as undamped as Nikon's good manual focus lenses.

Don't worry if you think it's broken; a 15mm lens has such huge depth of field that the image in the viewfinder doesn't look that much different at either end of the focus range!

Canon

On Canon, hold the shutter halfway as you focus.

Look for the AF sensors to blink as you pass the point of perfect focus. Only the dot on the bottom of the finder will stay lit so long as you are in focus.

Manual focus doesn't work very well on Canon using the viewfinder LEDs. It's super fast, but insufficiently precise. Worse, I find that my 5D Mark II blinked its LEDs at points very different from what gave good focus, usually coaxing me to focus too closely.

On older EOS cameras, look for the dot on the bottom of the finder as you hold the shutter. Their AF sensors may not light, good luck!

No big deal, see your manual, and with this lens, you never have to move a switch to select manual focus.

On AF or "digital" cameras, look for the in-focus dot (or dots) in the finder.

Nikon's AF cameras are better than Canon's for precise manual focus as we need here. Use your center AF sensor, use a camera with three " > o < " LEDs in its finder for manual focus, and you ought to be OK.

Scale focusing is simply guessing the distance and setting it on the scale. This is usually the best way to focus ultrawide lenses on SLR cameras.

Scale focus works much better than turning the ring and looking through the viewfinder; ultrawide lenses don't do much as the focus is changed.

This would be a better lens in Zeiss marked the focus scale in whole numbers instead of random increments, and adding tick marks. Zeiss' cinema lenses do exactly this because motion picture cameras are often focused by the scale. In Hollywood, we measure the distance precisely with a tape measure to our subject.

We need highly magnified live-view through the finder, like the Fuji X100, to focus ultrawides well, and barring that, scale focus is the way I focus almost all of my ultrawide fixed lenses. (Zooms have crappy focus scales and are autofocus, eliminating the problem.)

There are no lateral color fringes on a Canon 5D Mark II, which is excellent, and far better than Canon's lenses. The Canon 5D Mark II has no ability to correct color fringes, and with this Zeiss lens, there are none.

This is a spectacular 15mm lens; Zeiss' guys really got it right with this one!

The Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 is the sharpest non-fisheye lens I've ever used shorter than 20mm. Bingo!

As I've covered at the introduction, this superior Zeiss lens makes today's plastic "professional" zooms and 14mm lenses from Canon look like they're broken by comparison if you're looking at digital images at 100% on your screen. I'm serious, this is why so many people think their Canon ultrawide lenses are defective, but that's just Canon's state-of-the-art today.

Nikon's 16-35mm and 14-24mm are much better than everything else from Nikon; when I get my hands on the Nikon version of this Zeiss lens, I'll compare them. It's the Canon shooters who need this lens; Nikon's two best are pretty good — but Nikon's 14mm is pretty bad, too.

Throughout most of the full-frame on a 21 MP Canon 5D Mark II, this Zeiss masterpiece is completely sharp and contrasty at every aperture. It can excite aliasing from roof tiles a quarter-mile away even at f/2.8! This is Zeiss' spy-satellite technology at work. Stop down if you need depth-of-field or less falloff, but not to get more sharpness. I see the image dulling from diffraction by f/5.6 or f/8!

At the farthest sides (image height = 18mm) on a 21 MP Canon 5D Mark II, it's much sharper than the sloppy lenses from Nikon and Canon at every aperture, and gets sharper as stopped down to f/8 as optimum. Smaller apertures get duller from diffraction.

In the farthest corners (image height = 21mm) on a 21 MP Canon 5D Mark II, it's much sharper than the sloppy lenses from Nikon and Canon at every aperture, and gets sharper as stopped down to f/11 as optimum. It's softer at f/16 and f/22 from diffraction.

As I've covered above, this Zeiss is much better optically and mechanically than Canon's ultrawide zoom and 14mm lenses. I still need to get my hands on a Nikon version to compare to Nikon's best.

Since it's manual-focus-only, this Zeiss is much less convenient than any of Nikon's or Canon's AF lenses.

Angle-of-View

When actually compared to the Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 II at 16mm, the Zeiss 15mm f/2.8 has just a tiny bit more angle of view. This is because the barrel distortion of the Canon 16-35 causes more to be squeezed into the edges, giving it a wider angle-of-view than an undistorted 16mm lens. Of course the Zeiss 15mm sees a bit wider, but it's much less distorted.

When actually compared to the Canon 14mm f/2.8, the Canon 14mm has a significantly wider view than the Zeiss 15mm f/2.8. 14mm versus 15mm is a 7% difference, and I see at least that much difference in actual angle of view.

It's for people who demand the best image quality on their full-frame cameras, and don't worry about having to focus manually.

You Canon, tripod, HDR and pan-stitching guys are going to love this lens.

If you've found my efforts here in evaluating this lens and sharing these results, this free website's biggest source of support is when you use any of these links, especially this one to the Nikon ZF.2 version or this one to the ZE Canon version, when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thanks! Ken.

Canon

Canon users have no really sharp ultrawides available from Canon, so if you're serious about your image quality and need an ultrawide lens, this is your lens.

This Zeiss 15mm lens is so good that you can get great results on the 5D and 5D Mark II, saving you from having to shell out for the automatic lateral color fringe correcting 5D Mark III, since this Zeiss lens is devoid of the color fringes that plague Canon's ultrawides.

That's right: this Zeiss 15 is so good that the additional processing in the Mark III has nothing to do, so save your money and spend it on this lens instead. Canon's tele zooms are excellent; the only real need for the new correction ability of the Mark III is to try to make good for Canon's crummy ultrawides.

This Zeiss is marvelous, but heavy. The fixed Canon 14mm lenses are much smaller and lighter — and autofocus.

This Zeiss lens is mostly of interest to the very serious Nikon user who doesn't want to lose sharpness lost in resampling pixels, which is an unavoidable artifact of software or firmware distortion correction.

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